


(my waking) nightmare

by AlexiaBlackbriar13



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 6x19 Related, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Light Angst, Nightmares, Post 6x19, family comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 11:17:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14377521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexiaBlackbriar13/pseuds/AlexiaBlackbriar13
Summary: Post 6x19. Felicity awakens from a nightmare about Oliver dying due to being hurt while alone in the field... to find her husband missing from their bed. Understandably, she panics.





	(my waking) nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> lol 6x19 was only five minutes long in my opinion so here's my 6x19 fic relating to about two minutes of those five
> 
> unbeta-d bc i wrote this in like half an hour soooo all mistakes are mine judge me

* * *

_Oliver was standing in front of her in their apartment, blood trickling over his hands in thick rivets of crimson as he placed pressure on a massive stab wound in his side. He collapsed to his knees with a pained moan._

_Felicity tried to reach out for him, but hit an invisible glass wall that separated them. She pounded on the glass with a frustrated, panicked yell, watching in absolute terror as her husband keeled over, lying on the floor as he bled out slowly._

_She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t touch him, she couldn’t even get close to him. Oliver was dying directly in front of her and she was helpless. He’d gone out onto the streets as the Green Arrow alone, with nobody to watch his back, and he’d been attacked and grievously harmed._

_Shouting his name again, Felicity bruised and braised her knuckles as she punched at the invisible wall, desperately trying to get to him._

_By the time she shattered the glass, it was too late. Her husband’s blood pooled around her shoes. There was red everywhere. And Oliver wasn’t breathing._

She awoke with a strangled scream, tangled in the bedsheets so tightly that she immediately began thrashing to try and free herself. Struggling to breathe properly due to hyperventilating, Felicity heaved herself out of bed. She was trembling all over. Bracing her back against the wall, she slid down it until she was sitting on the floor, attempting to calm herself down and regulate her rapid heartbeat.

A nightmare. It had just been a nightmare. It wasn’t real. But -

_Oliver._

Stumbling back onto her feet, she fell onto the bed and felt tears brimming in her eyes when she realized that her husband wasn’t there. His side of the bed wasn’t even warm anymore, signifying he hadn’t been there for a while.

Immediately, her panic, which she’d managed to dial back down to a 3 on her personal scale, rocketed up to alarming levels. She scrambled to grab her phone from the nightstand, thumbing it open and calling her husband. It instantly went to voicemail. She tried again. Voicemail. Beginning to get extremely agitated again, Felicity yanked on her dressing gown and a pair of socks before running out of their bedroom to check the living room.

Oliver wasn’t there either.

“Oh god,” she whined, her legs weakening beneath her. She was forced to take a seat on the couch so she didn’t topple over. “No, no, no, no, no…”

“Felicity?” William emerged from his own bedroom, rubbing his eyes sleepily. She must have woken him up with all her crashing around. An expression of exhausted confusion crossed over his face as he questioned, “Are you okay? What’s going on? It’s two in the morning.”

“Where’s your dad?” she asked, breathless.

“I thought he was asleep with you in bed,” William answered.

_Oh god oh god oh god oh god._

_Where was he?_

After her nightmare, Felicity was not going to be able to relax until she had her husband in her arms again. Whether Oliver knew it or not, he was terrifying her by disappearing into the field by himself each night, giving her no way of contacting him. Felicity was already having trouble sleeping, mostly because she went to bed each night before Oliver returned back home and she never knew whether he was actually unhurt or not.

William snapped her out of her musings by asking, “He’s not here? Did he leave?”

“Can you - can you get my tablet please?” she choked out, chest heaving with the effort it took to breathe. She couldn’t think straight, could barely feel her limbs. Walking to get it herself would probably result in Felicity falling over and knocking herself out. “It’s on the kitchen counter charging.”

William quickly collected it and handed it over to her, taking a seat beside her on the couch. The warm weight of her stepson leaning into her side was enough to center Felicity enough to focus on checking her tracking systems. Oliver’s GA GPS wasn’t active and showed the suit was still in the bunker. He wasn’t out in the field by himself, thank god. Her systems did, however, indicate that his phone was also located in the bunker, and since she knew he took it everywhere with him these days, that most likely meant that Oliver was down there.

She lunged to pick up her cell phone which she’d dropped on the table, but William caught her wrist. “Felicity, you’re shaking,” he said worriedly. He wasn’t wrong. She was wracked with so much anxiety that she was pretty much vibrating.

“I need your dad,” she told him. “I - I really need him right now.”

“Did you have a nightmare?” William asked, brow furrowing. “It’s alright. Whatever happened in it, it’s not real.”

“I know - I know - I just -”

Her step-son nodded with a weak, sympathetic smile. “You need to see Dad to reassure yourself that he’s okay.”

She exhaled in relief that he understood. Of course, he would know where she was coming from. She wondered briefly how often William laid awake late at night, worrying about whether or not his father would arrive back home safely.

Glancing over her shoulder at her tablet screen, William suggested, “We should go to the bunker.”

“I don’t know if I can drive right now,” she admitted.

“You should send an alert to your computers there then,” he said. “If Dad’s there, he’ll see them and at least call you back.”

Felicity blinked. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? “Good idea.”

She sent a pop-up alert to the bunker computers asking Oliver to contact her and come home as soon as possible. She barely had to wait a couple of minutes before she received a text from her husband, informing her he’d be home in ten minutes. As she read the text, Felicity virtually burst into tears. Oliver was alive and he was coming back to her. William seemed to recognize she was too emotional to text back, so took her phone and fired off a quick response before putting it down and hugging her. Resting her head in her stepson's shoulder, the blonde embraced him back tightly as they comforted each other.

It was only once they heard the front door being unlocked that William and Felicity reluctantly released each other. Felicity sat at the edge of her seat, watching the door eagerly as it opened.

Oliver greeted her with a bemused but happy expression as he stepped inside, securing the latch behind him. Before he could say anything, Felicity leaped up and threw herself at him with a quiet sob. Wrapping her arms around Oliver’s waist, she buried her face in his chest and pressed her ear against his heart. When she heard the steady thud of his pulse, she sobbed again. The archer immediately began rubbing her back soothingly, cradling the back of her head with one of his hands gently.

“I’m going back to bed,” William informed them quietly. “I hope you feel better, Felicity… I love both of you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, bud,” she heard Oliver respond.

Hearing his voice caused her to shiver. She didn’t feel him wince at all when she hugged him a little tighter but she swiftly pulled back to check him over for injuries; he had none visible to the eye and wasn’t flinching at all. Reassured he was fine, Felicity went back to holding onto him, fisting her hands in his shirt as she hiccuped into the fabric.

“Hey, hey,” Oliver whispered, leaning back to cup her cheeks tenderly. His cobalt eyes were warm but filled with concern and puzzlement. “Are you okay? William just replied back to my text that you were upset and I needed to get back quickly. What’s going on?”

“I had a nightmare about you dying,” she mumbled. “You got stabbed because you were out there by yourself and I - I couldn’t help you. You were bleeding out and I couldn’t do _anything_.”

“I’m okay, I promise,” he told her, smiling softly at her. “You don’t need to worry about me, I can handle myself perfectly fine out there.”

“But I _do_ worry about you,” she shook her head. She hated how much her voice was shaking. “I know you promised to come back to me every night but I can’t believe that promise, Oliver. I’ve almost lost you too many times to count and every single time you promised me before that you would come back, you so nearly didn’t. And just about all of those times you came close to dying, it was because you were acting as a lone wolf and didn’t have somebody to watch your back. And now you’re insisting you need to work alone again and I... I can hardly sleep because I’m so worried about you all the time.”

Oliver looked distraught. “This really bothers you, doesn’t it.”

“We got married five months ago,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to become a widow before we even reach our first wedding anniversary.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t realize how much this was upsetting you before.”

“It’s not just me. William… he’s already lost one parent, Oliver, he can’t lose another one. He won’t tell you but he's worried about losing you too.”

“You’re not going to lose me.”

“You _don’t know that_.”

“I will try my best to come home to both you and William every single night,” he told her. “I promise you, Felicity, I will do everything I possibly can to make sure I get back to you. I’ll… I’ll be more careful. I won’t take as many risks. I’ll assess any potentially seriously dangerous situations before jumping into them. If you like, I’ll text you before and after my patrols and link my personal cell to my comms so you can contact me in the field if you need to.”

“Please do that. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack earlier when your phone went to voicemail.”

“Okay, I will.” He smiled at her, looping an arm around her lips and bending over to gift her with a gentle kiss. Disappointingly, the archer drew away before Felicity could properly savor it, leaving her licking the delicious taste of him from her lips with a shuddering exhale. “We’re both exhausted… we should go to bed.”

She kept her grip firm on his shirt as he stepped away. “No getting up and leaving in the middle of the night this time. _Please._ I… I need you to hold me so I know you’re still there. I need to feel you.”

“I won’t leave,” he swears to her, leading her into their bedroom by their joined hands. “We’ll even sleep in late tomorrow morning. I’ll make you an omelet for breakfast with freshly squeezed orange juice and ground coffee and everything. _And_ I won’t go on patrol tomorrow night - I can ask Lyla to watch William and we can go out for dinner, watch a movie together.”

She sniffed, the tears coming back again only because she was so, so happy that her husband was here for her and actually listening to her concerns, willing to change his behavior so she didn’t have to worry so much. “Thank you.”

He kissed her again sweetly, stripping off to only his underwear and helping her out of her dressing gown. Guiding her to sit down on the mattress, he pulled her socks off and pressed even more kisses up her legs, paying specific attention to the several small scars along her calves and thighs caused by bullet brushes and fragments from the limo attack. They were too tired to start something they couldn’t properly finish, so he pulled her into his arms under the blankets. Felicity took a hold of his hands and delicately laced his fingers together over her bare stomach, which he started to caress lightly with his thumbs. 

He nuzzled against her neck, murmuring, “I love you so much.”

“I love you too.”

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed! please leave kudos or comment if you liked :)
> 
> tumblr: @alexiablackbriar13  
> twitter: @lexiblackbriar


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